Years before her breakout role on Master of None made her a star, Lena Waithe was actually on camera in Dear White People, the 2014 movie that director Justin Simien later adapted into a hit Netflix series. “Back in the day, everybody who knew Lena was like, you’re going to be a star,” Simien said on this week‘s episode of the Little Gold Men podcast. Waithe was a producer on the film, but Simien had bigger plans for her. “When we were filming the movie, I kept trying to give her lines. I kept trying to put her in the movie. You see her back in it briefly, [but] she was like, ‘No, no, I’m a writer.‘”

The first season of the Dear White People series debuted two weeks before the second season of Master of None; it was a big year for old friends Simien and Waithe. But when the second season of Dear White People went into production, they made time for a reunion. “By the time the second season came around, she was like, sucker, I gotta be on the show. And I was like, ‘I know!’ When, between the Spielberg movie and AT&T and the Jordan commercial, are you available?’”

They came up with a role for Waithe on a reality-TV parody show-within-the-show, which gave her the chance to play much larger than life than usual, and in one memorable scene, become a terrible actor—on purpose. “It was really about having fun and giving her space to be Lena,“ Simien said. “Because she’s my bestie and we know each other well, we worked it out.”

There are two other major cameos in the latest installment of Dear White People—one a thread that runs throughout the season, and the other a surprise in the finale so shocking that we won’t spoil it here. As for the first: Tessa Thompson, who played the central character Sam in the Dear White People movie, returns to the world of Winchester as conservative pundit Rikki Carter, who has been invited to speak on campus. “I wanted to give her something that wasn’t just like, a version of Sam,” Simien said of bringing Thompson back into the fold. “I wanted to give her something to say that was different and awkward and made you feel some type of way.” In the scene where she and Sam come face-to-face, there’s a meta thrill in seeing Sam (now played by Logan Browning) meet her literal older self. “It gives me chills that we were able to pull that together,“ Simien said.

In the wide-ranging Little Gold Men conversation, Simien talks about his decision for the politically minded show to never mention Donald Trump’s name, how he decided to make an entire episode around an argument between two people, and what he learned about Hollywood from working on the Oscar campaign for Brokeback Mountain back in 2005.

Also on this week’s episode, a dispatch from Cannes with Richard Lawson, who joins Mike Hogan, Katey Rich, and Joanna Robinson to talk about the buzz so far and the magical-seeming bar where all the journalists gather to talk about what they’re seeing next. Listen to this week’s episode above, or find Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts, where you can also leave a rating and a review.